Many psychological tests have heretofore been used or proposed for measuring components of a subject's behavior. Such tests may be divided into three general groups.
A first group of tests includes psychometric tests such as intelligence tests, for example, which are highly structural with the problem and the result being very clear and with the answers being either right or wrong. Such tests may be administered by lay persons but have little application to testing of components of a psychological nature.
A second group of tests includes projection tests which have been used in measuring psychological components. Such tests are not highly structural and the solutions are many-fold with neither right nor wrong answers which depend upon the analysis of the subject by the person administering the test. Such tests involve insight into the subject's mind and require a qualified psychologist to administer the test.
A third group of tests includes "objective" tests in which the aim or result of the test is totally unknown to the subject. In such tests as conducted in the prior art, there is a premise which is empirically verifiable and whose theoretical basis need not be known. For instance, a correlation between darkness and a proneness toward neuroses, a correlation between acceleration of pulse rate and anxiety and a correlation between intellectual work and muscle tension may be assumed. In such tests, an attempt is made to create a test situation which is as close as possible to a real-life situation on the assumption that the subject's reaction or behavior is closely related to his general functioning. Such an assumption is questionable and objective tests are not refined enough to be useful for diagnostic purposes.
In spite of the huge number of known psychological tests, there has been no known theoretical or practical measurement of suggestion or suggestibility which has been considered a nebulous factor or component. Attempts may be made in known types of tests to recreate the same reaction obtained previously in an analagous situation, but it is questionable whether in such tests, a given result is due to a suggestibility factor or due to a learning process performed during the test.
There is such a thing as a so-called "prestige suggestion" involving thought and feeling processes. For example, so-called body sway tests have been performed in which to a blind-folded person or to one in a dark room, a command is made "Attention, you are falling forward," and most subjects will lean forward in response. Such tests as heretofore been made have been of very limited value because they are limited to verbal instructions which cannot be modified and are inexact because it is difficult to qualify or quantify the relationship between the person conducting the test and the subject being tested. The same subject might respond to a command given by one testing person and not respond to the same command given by a different testing person.